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Suicide is Painless

Y’all take it easy now.
This isn’t Dallas. It’s Nashville. This is Nashville. You
show ’em what we’re made of. They can’t do this here
to us in Nashville. OK, everybody,
sing. Come on somebody, sing. You sing.
—Haven Hamilton, after
Barbara Jean
is shot, Nashville

The
anthem sung by the crowd following the impassioned plea above, as Robert Altman’s
film comes to its piercing end, is a peculiar—and peculiarly American (this
is Nashville, after all)—circling of the affective wagons. The chorus resounds
in oxymoronically defiant resignation: “It
don’t worry me. It don’t worry me./You
may say that I ain’t free,/But it don’t worry me.”